The Life Of Nelson, Volume II.
A separation preceded and caused by such circumstances as this was, could not fail to be attended with bitterness on both sides; yet one could have wished to see in a letter which is believed, and probably was intended, to be the last ever addressed by him to her, some recollection, not only of what he himself had done for his stepson, but that once, to use his own expression, "the boy" had "saved his life;" and that, after all, if he was under obligations to Nelson, he would have been more than youth, had no intemperance of expression mingled with the resentment he felt for the slights offered his mother in the face of the world. With Nelson's natural temperament and previous habits of thought, however, it was imperative, for his peace of mind, to justify his course of action to himself; and this he could do only by dwelling upon the wrong done him by those who, in the eyes of men generally, seemed, and must still seem, the wronged. Of what passed between himself and Lady Nelson, we know too little to apportion the blame of a transaction in which she appears chiefly as the sufferer. Nisbet, except in the gallantry and coolness shown by him at Tenerife, has not the same claim to consideration, and his career had undoubtedly occasioned great and legitimate anxiety to Nelson, whose urgency with St. Vincent was primarily the cause of a premature promotion, which spoiled the future of an officer, otherwise fairly
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